Thursday, June 4, 2009

Do Greencollar Jobs Pay $76,000/year or $12.00/hour?

I wasn't going to link to it but today CNN has an article I thought would be a good juxtaposition. Green Sheet quotes something called the Carbon Salary Survey and appears to have lost his critical thinking abilities. Take a look at the job titles/sectors in the (first annual) survey:

TONY BLAIR is busy preparing for talks in the Middle East on a subject of global importance. The subject is not the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, but climate change, in a speech to be delivered to a conference in Abu Dhabi sponsored by a Swiss bank....

Governments should use public money aimed at deflecting the threat of recession to spur savings by backing energy efficiency too, the head of the United Nations Environment Programme, Achim Steiner, said.

...San Francisco has at least two dozen other city employees already working directly on climate issues at a cost to taxpayers of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

..."If there are 25 people working on climate protection issues for the city, that's a good start," Newsom spokesman Nathan Ballard said. "Ten years ago, there probably weren't any. It's smart policy to have one point person at the highest level of city government to coordinate all 25 of them."...In addition to the director of climate protection initiatives in Newsom's office, San Francisco has an Energy and Climate Program team of eight people in the Department of the Environment, who combined earn more than $800,000 a year in salary and benefits, including a "climate action coordinator."

At least 12 San Francisco Public Utilities Commission staff members work on climate issues related to water and energy, including a $146,000-a-year "projects manager for the climate action plan."...

In contrast, from CNNMoney:

The new 'good' job: 12 bucks an hour

In the Midwest, communities race to replace dwindling auto jobs with renewable energy ones, but workers will have to sacrifice on their pay.

Massive investment in renewable energy could ultimately create 4 million manufacturing jobs. But for the workers in the bottom rung of this movement, the shift to green jobs could very well mean a pay cut of nearly 60%, a trend spreading across the entire manufacturing sector.

Many of the entry-level jobs making green energy components start at $12 an hour, much less than the now extinct $28 an hour job that had allowed high school-educated workers in the auto sector to achieve middle class status.

"Particularly at the lower end, these are not very good jobs," said Philip Mattera, research director at Good Jobs First, a labor-friendly research group, also acknowledging that the renewable energy sector paid wages that were "all over the map.">>>MORE

I've also covered this aspect of greencollar claims, with specific names and numbers:

Discussion of greencollar jobs is usually short on specifics so I'll do a mini data-dump for you.Three major wind companies have recently set up shop in Arkansas. Turbine maker Nordex will pay an average $17.00/hr. Blade manufacturer LM Glasfiber was recently advertising for production tecnicians at $12.13/hr. and Polymarin Composites will pay its 830 employees an average of $15.00. sourcesIn contrast there is a cottage industry that pays considerably more, from our May 30, post

With all the political positioning of climate legislation as 'creating' jobs it is startling how reticent the proponents are about actual numbers. From doing due diligence I know some of the numbers but public sources that have specific wages that I can link to aren't common.

Some of the jobs are well paying. For example the insiders at First Solar have sold $1.1 Billion worth of stock in the last 15 months.(bless those German hausfraus paying the feed-in tariff)